BART Station Agent Fired After Giving Unused Tickets To Needy Student

OAKLEY (CBS 5) – A Bay Area Rapid Transit station agent who gave a needy teenager $300 of unused transit tickets is out of a job.

Jim Stanek told the San Francisco Chronicle that he got a termination letter from BART officials Tuesday.

Stanek had given a friend’s 16-year-old grandson paid, unused tickets that commuters left behind at the station. The boy from Oakley used them to pay for the $11 trip from the Pittsburg / Bay Point station to San Francisco, where he attends the Flex Academy charter school.

“The rules are very clear…those tickets are like cash to BART,” transit spokesman Jim Allison told CBS 5 last month. “The integrity of the system depends upon how they’re handling the cash… and the tickets properly.”

According to Allison, tickets are supposed to be turned over to lost-and-found, or they go to the agency’s treasury department.

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